Body Language: The Body as Medium and Object of Cross-Cultural Communication in the Pacific

This paper examines the various ways in which bodies figured in the production of vocabulary lists by explorers and philologists in the Pacific in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. European explorers looked to the body as a common ground for establishing communication with non-Europeans: in the moment of cross-cultural encounter naming body parts was a way of moving from non-verbal communication to words and language. A number of assumptions were involved in and followed from this use of the body. On the one hand, the explorers, and the “philosophers” and philologists who used their vocabulary lists, assumed that the human body was both neutral and universal: all peoples possessed bodies that could be classified and named, a “fact” which attested to the presumed unity and fundamental sameness of humankind. On the other hand, the emphasis on naming body parts could also be used to support Enlightenment theories about the concrete and body-fixated nature of “primitive” languages. Both assumptions, however, ignored the deeply gendered and cultured nature of the bodies involved in the actual cross-cultural interactions that produced the vocabulary lists. Interestingly, this is often apparent in the lists themselves: in the focus on the male body, in the record of many words for one body part, or in the creation of English phrases for body parts for which there were evidently no English equivalents. It emerges, too, in narratives of the display, exposure, or concealment of body parts in cross-cultural encounters. Through a reading of the narratives of James Cook, Joseph Banks, Charles Wilkes, and Horatio Hale, and focusing on European encounters with Aboriginal people in eastern Australia and Indian peoples in the American Pacific Northwest, this paper explores the use of bodies as medium and object of cross-cultural communication.